Pair Programming is about Quality

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

Nowadays, there is in the software development community a common understanding that agile methodologies are the best approach to build applications. One of the most extended methodologies is Scrum and very frequently is implemented together with some eXtreme Programming practices.

One of these practices is pair programming, a lot of times considered as a very exotic and expensive practice.

It might seem that two people working together in the same task causes the doubling of the cost, but however, regarding the medium and long term, nothing could be further from the truth.

First of all, pair programming is not an easy practice. It requires a lot of energy, motivation and a huge attention span. But the benefits are endless:

Economics: controlled experiments found only a small development cost for adding the second person. However, the resulting code also had fewer defects. The defect removal savings should more than offsets the development cost increase.

Satisfaction: people working in pairs found the experience more enjoyable than working alone.